NOMA Design with Power-Outage Tradeoff for Two-User Systems

Abstract: This letter proposes a modified non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) scheme for systems with a multi-antenna base station (BS) and two single-antenna users, where NOMA transmissions are conducted only when the absolute correlation coefficient (CC) between the user channels exceeds a threshold and the BS uses matched-filter (MF) precoding along the user with the stronger average channel gain. We derive the average minimal transmit power to guarantee the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) levels of both users. Our results show that the average minimal power grows logarithmically in the reciprocal of the CC threshold and a non-zero threshold is necessary for the modified NOMA scheme to have finite average minimal transmit power. Further, for the massive MIMO scenario, we derive the scaling laws of the average transmit power and outage probability with respect to the antenna numbers, as well as their tradeoff law. Simulation results are shown to validate our theoretical results.